Sunday, August 29, 2010

Bloom Box by Bloom Energy Shown on 60 Minutes – More and more companies nowadays are investing in green technology to become energy efficient. One of the rising companies in this field is Bloom Energy, a company based in Sunnyvale California providing solid oxide fuel cell technology and products for distributed electricity and hydrogen generation.

Bloom Energy announced its plans to raise $150 million in sixth-round capital to establish a market for its product called Bloom Box. Bloom Energy says it has booked most of this funding with Advanced Equities Investment. Bloom Energy’s planned Initial Public Offering or IPO has been valued at $1.45 billion.

So what is this product called Bloom Box and what makes it one of the most sought after energy efficient device by most huge corporations? Accordingly, Bloom Box is like an industrial-sized refrigerator, that sucks up oxygen on one side and fuel (natural gas, biomass, etc) on the other. Reports say that Bloom Energy bakes sand and cuts it into little squares that are turned into a ceramic, which are then coated with green and black “inks.” Using a special process, Bloom Energy creates these ceramic discs and stacks them together interspersed with metal plates of “a cheap metal alloy.” The bigger the stack the more power the Bloom Box will create. Below is a picture of how Bloom Box looks like:Since its launch last February, a lot of stock investors are now speculating that Bloom Box Fuel Cell would be the next Google in terms of stock price increase. Founded by a former NASA scientist, Bloom Energy is developing fuel cells for homes and businesses that produce clean, efficient electricity through chemical reactions.

In a press conference held last February, Bloom Energy revealed its Bloom Energy Fuel Cells saying that their fuel cells can take any of those fuels, and because of their unique chemistry, use that to produce electricity without the need for chemical plants. Several companies bought Bloom Box already as part of their investment to save energy which include eBay, Google, Lockheed, Wal-Mart, Staples and the CIA.